Friday, September 26, 2014

There are very few publications giving a
factual account of historical facts underlying the Ayodhya controversy. Yet this
controversy has played a decisive role in recent Indian politics, giving the
BJP the electoral breakthrough that ultimately brought it to power. Therefore,
it ought to be a matter for surprise that the professional India-watchers and
the academics concerned remain satisfied with the handful of very partial and
highly partisan treatments available in print. But the prevailing poverty of
information on at least the factual basis of the affair has now been remedied. This
book Rama & Ayodhya by Dr.
Meenakshi Jain (Arya Publ., Delhi 2013) will henceforth be required reading for
anyone pronouncing on Ayodhya.

Dr. Meenakshi Jain is a historian formerly
with the Nehru Memorial Library, presently Associate Professor in History at
Gargi College, University of Delhi. In this book she gives a very detailed
enumeration of all the sources of a pre-Muslim veneration for or cult of Rama:
inscriptions, sculptures and literary references. These already start in the
pre-Christian age and soon cover all of India. Yet, the Marxist historians
started the Ayodhya controversy in the late 1980s by claiming that there could
not have been a pre-Muslim Rama temple in Ayodhya as Rama worship is of more
recent vintage. This chapter concurs with the testimonies to Rama worship of
the historians employed by the Vishva Hindu Parishad in the Government-sponsored
scholars’ debate of 1990-91, except that it is far more complete.

Highly original is the chapter on Hindu
testimonies of Muslim iconoclasm and the counter-measures which Hindu society
took to prevent or remedy instances of iconoclasm. Particularly under Maratha
rule, Hindu ownership of Muslim-occupied places was often restored. But this
process was not easy and even in the Maratha domains far from complete. Often
there was a factual Maratha but a nominal Moghul sovereignty to which
lip-service had to be paid. Sometimes also, the local Brahmins were so fearful
of a Muslim return to power that they preferred whatever humiliating makeshift
arrangement they had negotiated to a full restoration of the erstwhile Hindu
temple. Often idols were dug up from their shelters in the ground and rituals
were prescribed in the event of their restoration. These testimonies supplement
the Muslim testimonies of iconoclasm presented by Sita Ram Goel in his
epoch-making book Hindu Temples: What
Happened to Them. Significantly, the “eminent historians” do not touch the
subject with a barge-pole.

Another chapter gives an exhaustive
enumeration of all the testimonies, including statements made in court, for the
tradition that the Babri mosque had replaced a Hindu temple. Here again, many
instances will sound familiar to those who have closely followed the debate,
but the list stands out by its completeness. It includes pre-colonial European
testimonies as well as reports by colonial officers, but most numerous are the
testimonies by local Muslims. It also cites the verdicts and internal
correspondence of the magistrates, and some statements by politicians. They all
prove that until the 1980s, it was a matter of consensus that the Babri mosque
had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. It was shared by all
parties concerned: Hindus, Muslims, European travellers as well as British
administrators and scholars. Yet, in a very sudden reversal, a statement by the
“eminent historians” from JNU in 1989, statement which already was questionable
at the time and has been proven false since, managed to make practically all
media and all Indian and foreign observers turn against the established
consensus and present it as the “Hindu fundamentalist myth”. I am proud to say
I was an exception. But now, that consensus has been restored, and unwilling
secularists still denying and lambasting it are fighting a fruitless rearguard
action.

An even more damaging part for the
secularists is Meenakshi Jain’s presentation of their own testimonies in court.
For the first time, we get to see how
one after another, the secular “experts” collapse or lose their credidibility
when subjected to cross-examination. One after another admits under oath that
he or she has no experience with or no professional competence on the history
or archaeology of Ayodhya. Their bluff was enough to fool the mass of secular
politicians and gullible press correspondents, but failed to stand up to
critical questioning. The Indologists who have invoked those “experts” as
arguments of authority, can somewhat restore their lost honour by publicly
naming and shaming them and by apologizing for following in their footsteps and
ridiculing the old consensus – rather than, at best, looking away and
pretending there never was an Ayodhya controversy in the first place; or,
worse, still keeping up the false allegations that once swept the concerned
public opinion across the globe.

The book also discusses related court
cases, the strange fact that a deity can act as a juridical person (though,
like a minor, it has to be represented by a fully empowered citizen), and the
archaeological findings as well as the unsavoury controversy around these.
Ultimately, they all turn out to support the old assumption that the Babri
mosque was built on a demolished Hindu temple.

One point I disagree with, is her seeming
acceptance of the VHP thesis that the Babri mosque replaced a “magnificent”
Rama temple.Some temples which lay out
of the way of the population centres and military routes failed to attract
attention and thus survived; the famous temples of Khajuraho come to mind. But
Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is simply
unthinkable that a sizable Hindu temple, a place of pilgrimage moreover, could
have survived the Muslim conquest and occupation. This
scenario denies the large-scale and systematic Islamic iconoclasm which could
not have spared a major place of Hindu pilgrimage; a deluded secularist could
have thought it up, but those who believed the VHP was anti-Islamic will be
surprised to learn of the whitewash of Islam implicit in the thesis that a Rama
temple could subsist for centuries in a centre of Sultanate power. More likely,
Babar found an existing mosque on the spot, in dilapidated condition (as a
consequence of the collapse of the pre-Moghul Lodi dynasty) or, like in the
recent past, under Hindu occupation. Only because he restored it as a mosque
has it been called the Babri mosque. Early in the Ayodhya debate already, a
theory surfaced that the “Babri” mosque had been built in the preceding
Sultanate period, as testified by its building style.

On closer inspection, this position is truthfully
described in some detail on p.292-4 as coming from the pro-temple archaeologist
R. Nath as well as from the pro-Babri (and otherwise also disgraced) historian
Sushil Srivastava, but without evaluation. In the preface (p.xvii), she only
says that Babar “allegedly” destroyed the Rama Janmabhumi temple, so the reader
cannot find anything wrong in her presentation of the controversy. At any rate,
the mosque called Babri Masjid was certainly built after the demolition of a
Hindu temple, but it is not sure that this was done by Babar. Not everything in
this case is known, but the core of the matter, viz. that Islamic iconoclasm
motivated by Prophet Mohammed’s precedent destroyed a major Hindu temple, has
been firmly established.

This is henceforth the standard book on the
Ayodhya affair. Any so-called expert who now fails to refer to it, is not to be
taken seriously.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

In a recent
conversation, the age-old topic of the need or desirability of sexual abstinence
came up. The exchange made me contemplate this vexed question again: there is
only so much you can think through in a lifetime, and perhaps my opinions had
been made in haste and needed some correction. Without having really developed
a definitive viewpoint, I have to reformulate my present thinking about it.

Celibacy, pro and con

Out of
politeness already, I wouldn’t want to condemn abstinence as superfluous or, as
some consider it, harmful. I know too many people who have chosen celibacy as a
lifestyle, either by oath or de facto, and seem to be quite satisfied with it,
apparently never even giving it another thought. While stories of sex scandals
(true or false) involving gurus make good newspaper headlines, I have known
quite a few celibate monks who were great yogis and never seemed to have
doubted their choice, e.g. the late Swami Hariharananda Giri, Swami Veda
Bharati, Swami Dayananda Saraswati (of Coimbatore), or Swami Naradanada Tirth. If
you have a sufficiently heady goal, most of all yoga, it can make you forget
most worldly attachments, including the need of a mate. They also cite some
important advantages, to be discussed below. Still, the objections to it are
equally old, and were often expressed by people with long and voluntary (but as
they later judged it, “misguided”) experience of it.

Vedic literature
represents an old objection to celibacy and to any other form of deliberate
childlessness, viz. that by virtue of being born from a billion-year-old
lineage of parents and children, we show ingratitude by breaking that lineage.
Instead we have a duty to procreate and continue this line. Indeed, the gift of
life by our parents creates a debt in us which we can only discharge by a gift
of life to children of our own. By that yardstick, celibacy or any other
deliberate prevention of procreation is a form of parasitism, of willfully not
discharging one’s duty. When the Buddhists in India institutionalized celibacy,
or when they introduced it in China, Brahmins and Confucians
objected that the Buddhist monks refused to play their part in the chain of
life. While their economic parasitism could perhaps be tolerated as they had it
in common with a part of the elite, their biological parasitism really stood
out as contrary to nature.

And yet,
celibacy has had success. The Jewish Essenes, the Christian monks (later also
the Catholic priesthood), the Vedantic and Jain monks, the Daoist monks, they
all took to celibacy. It would seem there is a link between the spiritual
vocation and celibacy. In each of the affected religions, laymen and some
religious personnel lived a normal married life, equally compatible with the
spiritual life, but celibacy freed up the most motivated seekers for full-time
spirituality. Out of enthusiasm for the higher life, numerous youngsters are
willing to sacrifice the prospect of conjugal life. Even activists who set
their standards lower than Liberation choose celibacy as the way to free them
from family constraints so they can fully devote themselves to their work, e.g.
the Opus Dei members or the Hindu-nationalist RSS whole-timers. Belief in the
validity of the goal for which you sacrifice married life largely determines
whether you will see the effort through.

On the other
hand, the Protestant Reformation largely abolished religious celibacy, and one
Japanese Buddhist monastic order opened itself up for “married monks”. Some
religious leaders explicitly condemned celibacy, reviving the old Vedic
objection to “parasitism”, notably the Sikh lineage. In my own youth, I
witnessed the wave of Catholic priests leaving the priesthood because they
preferred the love of a tangible woman to God’s love. It is not that they felt
any less religious, just that they couldn’t tolerate the shackles of celibacy
anymore. As one of my professors, who was a married ex-priest, said: “I still
feel like I am a priest.” For the same reason, many clerics sworn to celibacy,
in all the religions concerned, have strayed from their vows and enjoyed love
on the side, all while remaining in their religious roles. The grass is always
greener on the other side of the hill: among those who have experienced
celibacy, second thought develop.

To prove that celibacy
is not strictly necessary for the higher life, Hinduism knows of a category of
married yogis, known as seers or rishi-s, who continue the tradition of the
married men who became court poets and composed the Vedic hymns. The belief
that Liberation can only be reached by celibate monks is in evidence in some
texts, but is clearly wrong. My own principal yoga teachers have been married
men.

A realistic system
intermediate between lifelong marriage and lifelong celibacy was the Vedic
system of the three life ages: as student, as householder, and as
“forest-dweller”. (A fourth stage, of renunciate, has later been added to it,
but Hindus are mistaken to understand this as a fourth stage; it is an
alternative to the second and third stage in civilians’ life, viz. celibate
monkhood.) The forest-dweller stage starts when a householder has married off
his daughters and seen his first grandson: he withdraws from his worldly
duties. Often, he also withdrew from married life. I say “often”, as distinct
from “always” and “never”, because real life is more varied than the uniformity
of the law books. The best-known forest-dweller was the sage Yajñavalkya, whose
epoch-making explanation of the Self, the absolute cornerstone of all Indian
thought, was in fact a farewell address to his co-wife Maitreyi. When the
musician Ravi Shankar lost his wife and remarried in old age, some Hindus were
up in arms because the married state (and in his case, producing more
offspring) was not proper for his station in life.

The genesis of religiously motivated celibacy

The origin of
celibate monkhood probably lies in the bands of young warriors living on the
outskirts of society and spending their days putting each other to tests of
courage and fortitude. Normally, for every young man this phase of life ends
when he gets married. At stag parties, it is part of the ritual that the
friends try to dissuade the groom from leaving their jolly good company and
choosing the constraints of marriage and the householder’s life. Now, imagine
that this mock dissuasion succeeds. Some young men do not want to leave this
tough but free life; they want it to be their lifelong vocation, till death. Celibate
monks are older men who continue the bachelor lifestyle of young men. Their
asceticism is a peaceful but equally demanding form of the tests which young
warriors impose on one another.

Among the first
known practitioners of asceticism (the “sky-clad” Munis described in the
Rg-Veda, forerunners of the Naga Sadhus, who indeed still have a martial role
and train in wrestling-halls; and the proto-Jain ascetics), it seems that
celibacy did not so much mean sexual abstinence. It didn’t matter if they did
it with prostitutes or other willing women, what counted was that they remained
free from the bonds of marriage and the endless social codes that accompany the
householder’s state. This then is the first reason for celibacy, one equally
known to the non-religious “confirmed bachelors” in Western society: to remain
free. To be sure, “freedom” can mean a number of different things, but in every
case it is deemed to be mutually exclusive with the constraints of marriage.
Being free from social codes is the defining trait of the renunciates’ life,
which is why they shed their civil name with its connotations of region, caste
and family.

That sexual
abstinence was not required from sages who stuck to an unmarried wandering
lifestyle, is proven by their employment as sperm-donors. If a married man was
infertile and wanted to have offspring, he used the services of a man who lived
outside society. As a renunciate, he was also deemed to have the necessary
disinterest and self-control not to embarrass the social father. Thus, when
king Vichitravirya needed a stand-in to produce offspring, he brought in the sage
Vyasa. (When the royal wives received this forest-wanderer, they were struck by
his ugliness. Ambika closed her eyes, so the son born from this union was
blind; Ambalika turned pale, so her son was pale and weak; but when the king’s
maid and concubine was led to him, she had no such hang-ups and enjoyed their
union, so her son became a royal counsel renowned for his wisdom.)

A wholly
different reason for celibacy, very prominent in India but also known
elsewhere, is the belief in the supreme energy content of sperm. It is a fact
of life that ejaculating causes tiredness, proving that energy has been lost. After
sex, men tend to fall asleep rather than playing along with their energized
wives, or so the wives complain. Conversely, saving your sperm gives you
spiritual power. A variation on this idea is the Freudian notion of
“sublimation”: either you spend your sperm in normal sexual activity or you
sublimate it into a passion for higher pursuits. Since you cannot use your natural
quotum of sexual energy twice, directing this energy into spiritual matters
requires saving it from its more worldly use. When Indian freedom fighter
Subhas Chandra Bose died at the end of WW2, it transpired that he had an
Austrian wife and daughter, but millions of his followers refused to believe
this because such a charismatic leader could not possibly have wasted his
sperm. Also, Adolf Hitler was so popular (among Muslims because of his
anti-Semitism and militarism, but also) among Hindus because of the swastika,
his vegetarianism and his propagated (though untrue) reputation for celibacy.

So, both men and
women could invoke, as a justification for a life without sex, the waste of
time that living with a partner and possibly with children would entail for an individual
devoted to higher pursuits. But only men could also invoke the waste of sexual
energy: women were supposed to be more determined by nature, unable to make a
serious difference by their doings or non-doings. At any rate, the choice of
spurning sex life and practicing celibacy became the hallmark of the spiritual
life, esp. after Shankara (8th century CE) established a monastic
order at the centre of Hindu society.

The correct
interpretation of Vedic texts is tricky, but usually Hindus take the story of
the couple Agastya and Lopamudra as referring to this sexual abstinence for
spiritual reasons. In the end, she managed to seduce him into doing his conjugal
duty. This would be mankind’s oldest testimony of the belief in the spiritual
value of abstinence, though the Vedic poet failed to commend it (just as the
one Vedic testimony of sati, i.e. a widow’s following her husband into death,
is at once a rejection of this practice). This belief is given as the prime
reason for the celibacy of the monkey-god Hanuman, the secret of his immense
strength; and of the historical strategist Chanakya, who transmuted his sexual
energy into political and military shrewdness. It is given as the reason for
the celibacy of monks, but also forms the basis of the phenomenon of married
men deciding to live with their wives as “brother and sister”.

Abstinence within marriage

Famously,
Mahatma Gandhi told his wife Kasturba that henceforth, after four children were
born to them, their marriage would be free of sex. Some people consider this
saintly, I am not so sure about that. After his wife’s death, he, already in
his seventies, found it necessary to “test” his chastity by sleeping with naked
young girls. Again, some consider it saintly, I think it was positively sick. So
many millions of men have practiced chastity, either by lifelong celibacy or by
remaining faithful in marriage, and never made a song about it. They just did
it whereas this saint had to make so much drama about it.

In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Swami Yogananda
testifies how his mother confided to him that she and her husband had had sex
only once a year, just enough for procreation. In Hare Krishna communities,
married couples are required to have just enough sex for procreation, and
otherwise to abstain from it. In my observation, this results in cold marriages
and a high divorce rate. I have also had several friends impose this abstinence
on their wives or girlfriends, and invariably saw this end in separation. It
seems the intimacy of sexual relations is good for the bonding between spouses.
I doubt that people who practise this abstinence are thereby so much more
spiritual than others, eventhough this sacrifice of pleasure and togetherness
proves their initial spiritual commitment. In this case, I tend to forgive Saint
Paul for his wrong views on matters like the illusory Resurrection, and recommend
his advice that husband and wife should not refuse each other their bodies.

An alternative,
now popularized in New Age circles through workshops called “Tantric” or
pertaining to the “Dao of Love”, is that sperm should indeed be saved, but not
at the cost of sex. This goes back to an ancient practice in Chinese elite
circles of having sex without “spilling” any sperm. The man can save and
maximize his life force by dipping his “stalk” into the female juices but
refraining from ejaculation. The woman has no such option, but nonetheless
greatly benefits: it is because of her sexual excitement that the juices flow.
Feminists might object that the woman only serves as an instrument for the
man’s practice, but at least her satisfaction is highly valued, which is rather
preferable to, say, female genital mutilation. Of course, modern science is
skeptical of the magical properties ascribed to sexual juices, but at least the
practice of having sex without ejaculating is reported by many men as both feasible
and beneficial. The initial hurdles to be overcome are a sense of incomplete
satisfaction afterwards, which is overcome with some practice; and the female
partner’s feeling of being rejected, of the man withholding himself from her.
It is up to him to prove to her that this was a mistaken impression, and that
in fact she stands to gain from his self-control. In this case, the spiritual
benefits ascribed to this limited form of sexual abstinence are not moralistic
and anti-sexual, but pertain to the tangible gain in energy. The sexual excitement
and “friction” generate energy, and this energy is then channeled upwards. The
self-control contributes to a yogic attitude, though yoga itself is still
something else.

This
glorification of sexual abstinence has a basis in reality, but is much
exaggerated. Modern medicine holds that at least some sexual discharge is
healthier than constant self-denial. The choice between celibacy and marriage
involves far more than just the sexual aspect, but here the evidence is even
stronger. It has been shown that Protestant vicars, who are married, enjoy a
longer and healthier old age than Catholic priests, who are celibate. Hindus
will also object that Christian abstinence differs from Hindu abstinence in
that Christians effectively save up their sexual energy but don’t use it,
whereas in yoga it is transmuted into spiritual power. Being familiar with both
religions, I hesitate to speak out, if only because many venerated Hindu sages
aren’t really yogis.

“Tantra”

Conversely, the
“Tantric” glorification of sex is equally exaggerated, or is just plain wrong.
As a lady commenting on the sex scandal involving US president Bill Clinton
said, pooh-poohing all the commotion: “It’s only sex.”

Sex is only of
limited importance in yogic matters. The New Age slogan “f…ing towards
Enlightenment” (to borrow from a cover-story in the leading Dutch New Age paper
Onkruid) is obviously ridiculous: sex
turns attention outwards, whereas yoga turns it inwards. More seriously, it can
be observed that the attitude regarding celibacy and chastity differ between
different traditions promising a path to Liberation. In some traditions they
will teach you that abstinence is indispensible, whereas in others the same
spiritual path is practiced and taught by married men.The main difference here is not between
Western and Eastern, as both cultural spheres have known both celibacy and
skepticism thereof. Some think abstinence is a precondition for serious yoga,
others hardly even talk about the subject.

Now that the
word Tantra has acquired such a titillating aura in the West, it deserves
mention that this is all a big misunderstanding. To be sure, Tantra is a major
tradition and contains a lot more than this “left-hand path” of sexual
indulgence. Leaving those 99% aside, we had better realize that the explicitly
sexual part (the “transgressive sacrality”, i.e. doing for religious purposes
what is otherwise forbidden) is less than appealing. As a well-known researcher
says: the Tantra of New Age workshops is mainly concerned with giving women
better orgasms and men more staying power, but these were not at all the focus
of Indian Tantra practitioners. What was more in evidence was a sacrificial
ritual in which sexual fluids were offered to the gods. Not really appetizing,
and nothing that a modern Westerner would deem capable of triggering anything
worthwhile.

Sexual symbolism
is in evidence, as in the copulating gods of Tibetan Buddhism, or in the
Shiva-Shakti imagery, but its meaning is multidimensional and should not be
reduced to the sexual level. Thus, the mantra “Aum mani padme hum” can be
translated as “Hail the jewel in the lotus”, which Freudians (including a vocal
school of American Indologists) eagerly interpret as “the penis in the vagina”.
In fact, the sex organs are only the most explicit incarnation of the male and
female principles which are operative at every level, like the Chinese yin/yang
principles. It is heaven/earth, consciousness/nature, bright/shady, hard/soft,
fire/water etc., and yes, also male/female. The reductionist interpretation as
“nothing but” sexual symbolism is simply wrong and shows the limited framework
of psycho-analysis. The smaller cannot contain the greater, and
psycho-analytical models cannot grasp the vastness and complexity of Hindu
cosmology.

Marriage

Marriage may not
be for everyone, but for many it is the best setting for living their lives,
even for practising yoga. What should it look like?

As a principle,
walking the spiritual path entails limiting your worldly needs. Buying all
kinds of objects, travelling etc., it should all be kept to a minimum and
subordinated to the ultimate goal. Pursuing sex for its own sake may yield
colourful and interesting life-stories, but it is not yoga. Abstinence within
marriage may not be as colourful, but it need not be yogic either; it is only
recommended if both partners really agree to do it. However, if you get
restless by sexual abstinence, or if it entails going against social norms
(such as the requirement to “pay off your debts to your ancestors”), or if you
simply like living with your own family, a normal sex life paradoxically frees
you up more for spiritual life. In that case, as my yoga teachers taught me, it
is best to create a sociologically safe situation within which togetherness can
flourish. In today’s Western society this may not strictly require marriage
anymore, but a stable and enduring “relationship” is at any rate most conducive
to a yogic state of mind and a successful yoga practice. Love triangles,
cheating and all those other little pleasures only create unrest and distract
from what is really important.

Divorce may
sometimes be the best solution, and it is a good thing that this is now
accepted; but it should be the exception, not the rule. Indeed, many people get
divorced very mindlessly (often after getting married on a whim, too), in
passing also breaking up common projects and of course the protective common
home of the children. Most divorces that I have witnessed, including my own,
left in their wake a whole trail of material and emotional damage. All this
turmoil should be minimized if at all you want to focus on getting somewhere in
yoga. The yogi does not care to condemn the free sexuality of today’s society,
but it is hardly a yogic lifestyle.

While I reject
the Gandhian notion that husband and wife should live together as brother and
sister, for all men and women not united in a marriage bond, it is the perfect
model to follow. Hindus have a festival called Raksha Bandhan, the “bond of
protection”, in which women tie men a thread around the right wrist. This
signifies that they are united as brother and sister, that he will protect her
and she will give him good advice. (After all, women are wiser than men.) Its
general meaning is that men and women have a meaningful relation but without the
sexual dimension. Well, I can’t guarantee that Raksha Bandhan makes a real
difference in society, but at least the ideal is established.

In marriage, by
contrast, the partners should be united by “love and admiration”, as one of my
first yoga teachers (I remember being proud to be given his luggage to carry),
Ekiralla Krishnamacharya, said. This is all the more remarkable as most
marriages in India are arranged. You are expected to muster love, no less, for
a partner picked by your parents. Rather than an initial lightning of “love”,
meaning attraction, gradually subsiding, as in movies and in the West, your
love is expected to grow gradually, as you get more common experiences. That
often doesn’t work, anymore than love marriage always works. But on the whole
it gives fewer failed marriages, and as yet fewer divorces, than the Western
system.

One of my yoga
teachers in Belgium had a kind of arranged marriage. Since he spoke about it in
public, I guess it is okay to repeat the story here. When he was translating
for a lady who was taking a lesson from their joint Guru, the latter surprised
him with the question: “Do you like X?” And her: “Do you like Y?” Without much further
ado, they started preparing their wedding. Some 35 years later, they are still
together; she now has cancer and he is lovingly taking care of her. Beautiful.

Being very much
a Westerner myself, I am rather attached to the joyful experience of falling in
love. Sentimental! I remember, long ago, talking to ordinary Hindus in Varanasi
who had to laugh at the lyrics of sentimental love-songs, saying that you can’t
build a lasting marriage on something as fleeting as emotions, even an emotion
melodramatically presented as “love”. But then again, I understand that the
surprise of meeting the partner selected for you, and gradually discovering all
her charms (as well as the rest), has a lot going for it as well. While I
realize the possible drawbacks, I happen to have met many couples for whom an
arranged marriage was or is successful. Loving the spouse selected for you is
an extension of the love for those who did the selecting, viz. your parents. It
doesn’t deprive you of the right to choose, because some decades down the line,
you will choose the spouses of your children.

As for
“admiration”, it means that, while there may be a downside to your spouse’s
personality, you always have to focus on her good aspects. Of course we have to
see the positive side in everyone and everything, and we often fail; but this
is not just anyone, this is your spouse. It is really imperative that you
always remain conscious of the best in her. To turn one of the most profound
lines of Hindu philosophy into a piece of marriage advice: “Not because of the
wife is the wife being loved, but because of the Self.” This implies an act of
will. If you only go, reactively, by your emotions triggered by your partner’s
behaviour, you may find fault in her. But here, you remain conscious of your
own attitudes and stay on the positive side. Happy outcome guaranteed. It is
like Patañjali’s enumeration of the benefits of his life-rules: the imperative
of “contentment”, forcing yourself to be cheerful no matter what, yields the
benefit of “always being happy”.

In divorce
stories, one recurring complaint is the frequent outbursts of anger, ultimately
making life together unbearable. A yogi has control over his moods. Except for
saints, some anger may be inevitable, but at least you can develop the habit of
treating anger as wrong, to apologize for it as soon as it dies down, to make
up for it, and to stop thinking that you had a right to be angry. Modern
therapists are wont to say that it is good to vent your anger, that you shouldn’t
repress your emotions. Indeed, you shouldn’t repress them, you should make them
die down by remaining aware. Admiration for your spouse means that you remain
aware of her dignity, so that you think twice before venting your emotions on
her. This is a thoughtful and respectful attitude, yogic par excellence.

Conclusion

Yoga is the
self-realization of consciousness, which is the same in men and women.
Therefore, the modalities of sex (or no sex) only pertain to the practical
setting, not to yoga itself. Any guidelines are partly determined by culture,
and are at any rate relative. They should not be taken too literally.

These too are
only some fleeting thoughts of mine and undoubtedly fail to do full justice to
the importance of the topic. But the topic must at least be recognized as
important,for I have seen too many people wrestling with it or getting fixated
on some related belief or other. We should be realistic in these matters, all while
keeping our eyes on the ultimate goal.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Answering a
challenge to formulate the goal of yoga in a single page, I can start by saying
that it won’t even take me a page.

Yoga has many meanings and the first reports
on yogis were as miracle-workers. However, the
very first recorded definition of yoga, in the Katha Upanishad, has nothing to
do with paranormal powers. It describes yoga as “silencing the mind, shutting
out all thoughts”. A similar definition is given in the synthesis by Patanjali,
the Yoga Sutra: “Yoga is the stopping of the modifications of the mind.” Some
technical explanation about the preparations may then be given, but the
definition itself is very simple: emptying the mind. Not too easy (“next week, don’t
think of a monkey”), but certainly simple, like the zero among the numbers.

No goal need be defined. Silence is just silence, it is not in the service of anything else: "What's the use? No use! I just sit."

The conjunction
with the doctrine of reincarnation (which also exists in cultures that don’t
know of yoga), central to Jainism and Buddhism, is now generally believed east
of the Indus, and also among Western yoga practitioners. It says that the goal
of yoga is the stopping of the wheel of reincarnations. Possibly this is based
on empirically-gained knowledge of the reincarnation cycle by practising
yogis. The Buddha claimed to know all his incarnations, but accomplished yogis
I know, report never to have had such experiences. At any rate, reincarnation
is a separate doctrine not necessary for the notion and practice of yoga.

The conjunction
with the doctrine of kundalini (energy lying coiled at the base of the spine
which can be awakened and raised to the crown) is even younger, and was unknown
to the first yoga writers. Here again, kundalini exists separately from yoga:
it has been reported to rise in non-yogis, spontaneously or under the influence
of drugs, and is known in cultures that don’t know yoga, such as those of the
San (Bushmen), who dance to create a “warm feeling in the back”, or the
Australian Aboriginals. In China, it was applied in a meditational practice,
the “microcosmic orbit” where energy is led up the spine by the attention and the
breath. I suspect that “kundalini yoga” came about as a variation on this
Chinese practice, but am still looking for more relevant information. At any
rate, yoga can be understood without reference to kundalini.

In China, a
practice of yoga (meditation) existed in parallel with the yoga outlined in the
Upanishads and the ensuing Indian tradition. Zhuangzi speaks of “turning your
eyes and ears inwards”, “shutting out your own thinking” and “remaining silent”.
His simple definition is “sit and forget”. So, let’s cut out all the crap, all
the visions and “spiritual experiences”, and focus on this demanding but very
straightforward practice: emptying the mind.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

On 6
September 2014, in the central auditorium of Antwerp University, within biking
distance of my home, the School voor
Comparatieve Filosofie Antwerpen (no translation needed; in puristic Dutch
the middle terms would have been “Vergelijkende Wijsbegeerte”) celebrated its
25th jubilee. Its founding president was Ulrich Libbrecht, now 86,
who spoke at the function. He was my thesis promotor and main professor in
Sinology. The School’s present president is Patricia Konings, who was a fellow
student of mine. We graduated in 1989, just when our promotor founded the
School. I myself have given a number of lectures at the School; and know many
of the lecturers and former and present students. So I had ample reason to
attend.

It must
have been when I was doing my thesis, i.e. when the professor was laying the
groundwork for the School, that he related his experiences at the conference on
Comparative Philosophy in Hawaii. Richard Rorty and other big names in Western
philosophy dismissed the whole idea. Indeed, that was and still largely remains
the standard viewpoint in Western philosophy circles: that, as we learned in
our course of Fundamental Philosophy, “the Orient has ideas, has wisdom, but
not what we understand as philosophy”, and therefore no meaningful comparison
can be made. Worse, at the conference, lectures by Asian speakers were treated
as coffee-breaks. So, that was the mentality the fledgling School was up
against. Everybody talks about globalization, but the globalization of thought
is taking off only very slowly.

The celebration

The show started with Feniks Taiko, a handful of Flemings playing the
Japanese drums. To my surprise, Grete Moortgat, whom I had also known as a
student, had found a lifelong vocation as leader of this band.Very exciting. Later on, the afternoon was punctuated
by the very European folk band Faran Flad, featuring Erwin Libbrecht, the
founder’s son.

The welcome word was pronounced by Georges Bogaerts, co-founder and
secretary since the beginning, who gave a survey of the genesis and history of
the School. Briefly, it has been flourishing since the beginning, and even took
the turn of Professor Libbrecht’s retirement successfully. Per course day,
there are some 200 students; 90 at the start.

The next speech was given by Dra. Konings, who highlighted the positive
role the School had played in the lives of its students and the need for such a
globally-oriented thought centre. She emphasized the School motto Ego Mundi Civis, “I am a citizen of the
world”. She also thanked the School’s anonymous sponsors, for there is no form
of financing by the state.She offered a
Japanese acorn tree to Prof. Libbrecht, who lives in the hilly countryside,
still works in his large garden, and at one time was a leading pioneer of the
ecologist movement in our country.

Leading Flemish philosopher Guido Van Heeswijck spoke about “The
uselessness of Comparative Philosophy”. Useless, but a privilege. The word school
comes from scholè, “leisure”, and it
is the domain of “a scholar and a gentleman”. This is not the school our
politicians have in mind as a preparation for the labour market. The School is
really for pleasure, useless. There are, in English, two types of researchers:
“scholars” vs. “scientists”. Philosophy is for mankind what water is for the
fish.Ideas are never innocent, for
they change the world. Breaking out of the dogmatic sleep creates uncertainty,
“the certainty of uncertainty”. He quoted Libbrecht as desiring in philosophy
more Reine Luft, “pure air”. The School
contrasted with the average University, which is too much of a Procrustean bed
of usefulness.

Finally, playwright Peter De Graef brought a monologue. Of the many profound
topics touched upon in a light manner, I recall the first impressions of the
meditator. He is bound to ask himself, not as a deep metaphysical question but
as an immediate self-doubt: “What am I doing here?” And that question is the
beginning of all wisdom.

Ulrich Libbrecht

The aged professor himself took the stage to relate, with his usual
humour, a lot of detail about the founding of the school. In this process, the
crucial moment turning a plan into a viable institution was when he appointed
Georges and his wife Katrien Haeck, then yoga practitioners in Sint-Niklaas, as
the practical executors of his vision. Georges once negotiated with then
Culture Minister Joke Schauvlieghe, with Georges concluding that the School
would prefer its independence to state support annex state control: “We don’t
need your money.”Libbrecht then told
the story of Yu the Great, one of the legendary founding emperors of China, who
developed dykes and other controls for the flood-infested valley of the Yellow
River. The people who put into practice the techniques he had developed,
explained: “We learned it not from Yu but from the water.” In Libbrecht’s
experience, tangible reality easily trumps all philosophies.

Among his major influences he mentioned the late Leo Apostel,
philosopher at Ghent University, non-religious thinker and pioneer of the
notion of “non-religious spirituality”. In his path-breaking work on
“worldviews” as well as elsewhere, he emphasized that we must think
structurally. In the postmodernist age, it came to be said that “philosophy is
but a literary genre”, all subjective and relative. Against this tendency,
Apostel and Libbrecht have always stood firm in applying the exact methods of
the sciences to their philosophical researches. Anyone who has studied Libbrecht’s
model for comparing philosophies across cultures won’t be surprised by his
profession of trust in the physical sciences. Incidentally, my favourite course
with him was History of the Sciences in China.

Libbrecht has to spend three afternoons a week lying down tied to
machines for his kidney dialysis. In a sense, he is grateful for this plight,
for it forces him to do nothing and contemplate. In so doing, he had devised a
new book, De Bricoleur en de Dummies
(“The Handyman and the Dummies”, the “philosopher-handyman” being himself
according to established philosophy professors, and the dummies being the young
generations), already out, and even a subsequent one still in the manuscript
stage. Thereby hangs a tale. When I reviewed his magnum opus, the four-volume Dutch-language work Inleiding tot de Comparatieve Filosofie,
(“Introduction to Comparative Philosophy”) he was already past 70, and I called
it “probably his intellectual testament”. But in subsequent years he kept on
churning out book after book. His municipality, Kluisbergen, organized a big
celebration for his 80th birthday, where I acquired a copy of his
latest, Met Dank aan het Leven (“With
Gratitude to Life”), which he told me he intended to be really his last. I
gave it to my mother, equally born in 1928, who liked it a lot. But now it
turns out he has held his peace long enough. Earlier this year, his book about
non-religious spirituality came out: Adieu
à Dieu (“A Farewell to God”). And today I learned I will have to read two
more books. Scripta manent (“the
written word stays”), they say, but apparently, scriptor manet as well.

Then again, Libbrecht spoke in a carefree manner about his death, which
at his age must be considered impending. To those who considered him
indispensable, he assured that the graveyard is full of such indispensable
people. He saw for himself a remaining task of handelen, lachen en zwijgen (“ doing, laughing and keeping silent”,
after Peter Sloterdijk). He wanted to remain active till the very end; he
valued laughing as that which distinguishes man among the animals, more than
thought; and after a life in philology, he had found that “the great thing
about knowing many languages, is that you dispose of many ways to hold your
silence”. He ended with a line of the medieval poetess Hadewych: vaart wel ende levet scone, “fare well
and live in beauty”.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.